This podcast, recorded on my way home from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, is just a stream of consciousness reflection on the day. I am humbled to be in community with so many wonderful , talented and devoted educators, both here in Colorado as well as around the world.
Today’s podcast, one of several recorded today, is a reflection about my upcoming session for Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, recorded on my way home from the Colorado Podcast Summit. I hope to post more audio from the summit as time allows. (But, since time won’t ever allow, I’ll try to do so anyway.)
Tomorrow, I’m going to begin working with the 7-year-old winner of an XO computer. She won the computer in a drawing at our school district’s technology fair. We’ll be documenting her progress and our learning on a new blog. But as I am getting ready to create her blog, and populate the sidebar with lots of good resources, I’m wondering who else is out there in Colorado using XO’s. Know anyone?
UPDATE (2/16/08): The new blog’s up. Come join us!
Today’s podcast, recorded yesterday, is a short recording about Myra and her work with our district library clerks as they learn more about he read/write web. Enjoy.
Links
Myra’s course
The "23 Things " project – which is formally called Learning 2.0
An article about our school district’s Tech Fair (which I don’t mention in the podcast, really, but I’m pretty excited about)
What is Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation?
Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation
is a one day conference/meetup for teachers, administrators, students,
school board members, parents and anyone who is interested in
education. It will be held on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008, from 9:00
am until 3:00 pm at Arapahoe High School
in Centennial, Colorado, USA. We assume most folks will be from
Colorado, but everyone is welcome to attend, and we are working on some
ideas for virtual participation.
Conversation creates change.
You can learn much more about the conference on the wiki, including information about registering. Here are some highlights:
Tentative Schedule
We’re
still working on the details so this will be updated before the
conference. Also, this may expand if we have more folks register than
we are anticipating. (To quote Bud Hunt, "This conference stuff is hard!")
Registration
You must register
so that we know how many folks to expect and so that we can have enough
lunches available. (Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?)
Cost
Free,
baby. And lunch is included, thanks to the generous support of
Littleton Public Schools, St. Vrain Valley Public Schools, and Arapahoe
High School.
Wireless
BYOL (that would be
Bring Your Own Laptop) – we’ll have wireless access to the Internet
(filtered) – we may test our capacity to handle density of machines,
but hopefully things will go swimmingly. If not, we have wired machines
in various places you can access.
Questions for Students
We’re having a student panel discussion during lunch. Here’s your chance to submit some questions for them to consider.
Invite Others
We
strongly encourage you to invite other folks from your school,
district, neighborhood, or learning network to attend as well. It would
be great if everyone could bring at least one person with them that is
perhaps new to this conversation.
Questions?
Feel free to leave a comment on this post or on the FAQ page on the wiki.
My friend and colleague Jason is beginning some new blogging work with his students. You might be interested, particularly if you teach IB Theory of Knowledge. (One great thing about the IB Diploma pPogramme is that all students must take an epistemology course. I wish that everyone took a class about how we know what we know. Here’s more info on IB’s course.) Here’s a bit of info:
I’m having the students each host the blog for a week in an attempt to
get them to record for me how people are responding on the blog. All of
my expectations, including my "Blog Log", are found here.Now that my students are thinking, writing, and recording for me… it all begins. Now we’ll just see where it takes me.
In other classroom blogging news…
In
2 weeks or so, a new TOK blog will be set up for an international
audience. Schools from Colorado, Chicago, Munich, Singapore, the UK,
and Equador will be talking to each other. I’m still in the process of
formalizing how that will look but I’ll post more info. when I know.
As a plus and an aside, here’s a teaching resource for one IB TOK teacher’s courses, an online community for IB students and graduates, as well as a weblog ring of IB students. Interesting stuff.
Dana nails the issue of "excused" technological illiteracy:
Teachers have to realize at some point that exhibiting ignorance with this sort of pride is not OK. It is OK not to know something and to try to fix that, and I would hope that most teachers would do so. I don’t know everything. That’s true. At the end of my life, I still won’t know everything. I would hope, however, that when I reach the end of my life, I will never have exhibited pride about being ignorant of anything.
Dana nails it because she’s not necessarily focusing on a particular skill or skills, but more on the desire of those involved to be in a constant state of learning.
Karl’s post, which inspired Dana’s (and was inspired itself by Terry’s) gets really, really interesting in the comments, particularly as the discussion gets going into literature, and literacy, and technological literacy. You’ve got to read it for yourself, but let me contribute that I love both the words and the ideas of great literature. Particularly poetry, which is, to me, the near-perfect (or completely impossible) marriage of both.
As for technological literacy, the US federal government, via NCLB, now requires that all 8th graders be technologically literate. Well, actually, that’s not true – the federal government has required that all states test 8th graders to measure their technological literacy. Each state gets to define technological literacy, though, as well as the standards that they will use to measure it, which might explain some of the confusion in Karl’s conversation. Neat, huh?
It’s sure hard to teach something that you don’t know yourself. Of course, the question that I’m not going to attempt to answer at the moment is whether or not technology is a content area or something, like reading and writing, that transcends content. That’s a blog post for a different day.
** If you know the definition of technological literacy that your state is using , jot it down in the comments – I’d be curious to see the range of definitions. My fingers are crossed that there’s not much variance from state. I know that Colorado is going with the refreshed ISTE NETS as the state technology standards, with some minor revisions.
In this podcast, recorded on my way to the second day of the 21st Century Learning Navigator’s Conference, I discuss my thoughts on day one of the event, as well as an update on one of the challenges of my new job and some of my other work and travels this month. Oh — Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point gets mentioned, too, as well as a congratulatory message to Ben Wilkoff, a totally wired teacher.
Back in June, I got to meet Karl Fisch and hear what he’s up to. I mentioned that folks might want to pay attention. I knew good stuff was coming.
I told you so. (Sorry — couldn’t resist. Not like anyone doubted me. I just like being right.)
If you haven’t yet seen "Did You Know?," it’s time. I was totally and completely blown away. I’m probably going to show it to my journalism students tomorrow.
And that’s just his "back to school" icebreaker. Man, I wish I lived/worked a little bit further south.
What’s next, Karl?
